Home Valuation Leads - Seller Leads

Vendors

Contact Steve Kantor, President of Best Agent Business at 202-297-2393 or sales@bestagentbusiness.com if you want help with selecting a vendor or working the seller leads you are getting from one of these excellent vendors.

Seller Lead - Now Versus Future Business

It is very important to decide whether you are only going to pursue and work Now business for sellers or put systems, marketing, and calling in place to successfully work Future business. If you start to invest in seller leads with lower cost and lower conversion rates, unless you invest in system to work the Future business, it will not as successful as it could be. Here are our standard codes for Best Agent Business and our Billion Dollar Agent system.

Seller-A: Now business ready to list within 30 days.

Seller-B: Future business possibly ready within 1-3 months.

Seller-C: Future business which may want/need to sell home within 3-12 months.

Seller- C Becomes an SOI-C

For our systems, SOI refers to Sphere of Influence, friends/acquaintances/people you met briefly. SOI-C refers to someone who knows who you are, they have not done business with you, but they may consider you the next time they are buying/selling real estate. If you have spent $10-50 to acquire a Seller lead, and then spent $10-50 in mailing and calling costs to work the lead over 12 months for potential future seller business, you should not throw out that lead or asset if they decide they are not selling their home. We advise that you move them from being a Seller-C to be an SOI-C. Because of your contact/branding/marketing, they are more likely to consider you if they buy, sell, or refer someone to an agent if they are getting your monthly email newsletter and monthly mailed newsletter as an SOI-C.

Seller Lead - Types and Value

When you are selecting marketing approaches for seller leads, you should be aware of the conversion rates of different types of leads and time/investment needed in mailing and calling to work and follow-up with longer-term seller leads.

Assume a $200,000 sales price at 3% or $6,000 commission check. Here are types of Seller Leads and potential marketing cost and conversion rates and efforts needed to close a sale.

Referral from agent: You will usually pay 25% marketing cost or $1,500 for closed sale. You may close 25-50% of these leads but have no marketing cost unless it closes.

Listing Appointment: If you were willing to spend up to 20% marketing cost for seller business and had a 70% listing appointment win rate and 70% listings sold rate, then you would be willing to spend 20% of $6,000 or $1,200 for a closed sale or $600 per listing appointment.

Client/SOI Repeat/Referral: Close rate may be 25-50% with very little marketing cost.

Radio Seller Lead: For agents who do radio, radio seller leads may cost $100-$300 but the conversion rate is very high at perhaps 20% of leads received which would create a marketing cost of $500-$1,500/deal.

FSBO / Expired Preview Appointment: Based on the value of a Listing Appointment, you can consider an FSBO or Expired Preview Appointment or first meeting to develop rapport and qualify further as having less value. If you had 1 in 3 preview appointments lead to a listing appointment, then based on $600 value of a listing appointment above, each preview appointment is worth $200 in marketing costs.

Prime Seller Leads - Home Valuation Leads

This is a description of Home Valuation type seller leads generated by driving traffic via Facebook ads, Google PPC, SEO and other methods. This is similar to HouseValues from a few years ago.

The cost per lead may be $5-15.

The leads generated will be a mix of types depending on how much information was provided by the lead. Using various phone matching sources, some phone numbers can be appended to call the lead.

Seller - New Lead - Address Only: Only have address for mailing monthly.

Seller - New Lead - Email Only: Address and Email to contact so can send monthly email newsletter.

Seller - New Lead: Phone number is valid and able to call.

Farm Marketing - Target Potential Sellers: This involves using companies which analyze various criteria and project or predict which homeowners are most likely to sell their home in coming months. SmartZip, http://www.smartzip.com/, is one of the vendors. In this case, the predicted turnover rate is 20% and the farm mailings are only going to those homeowners. When they opt-in for a home valuation, it is more likely they will sell their home in the coming year. The cost to mail is higher based on the selection of data from the vendor. When costs are compared, the results may be similar to Farm Marketing - Regular.

Farm Marketing - Regular: In an area with a turnover rate of 5% per year, regular farm marketing involves mailing a monthly postcard to the neighborhood or area. Marketing costs end up being 10-30% and the costs are mainly mailing, not much calling.

Seller Lead - Marketing Costs of Calling and Mailing

Mailing: We advise sending a monthly jumbo postcard to all Seller leads. This is critical for future business of Seller BC leads to make sure they are aware of your company, brand you and your company, and make it easy for them to find your email and phone number when ready to sell their home.

Cost: $10/year per lead. This is based on an estimated 80 cents per jumbo postcard

12 months. Thus, if you have piled up 200 Seller Leads, we advise spending 200 or $10 = $2,000/year mailing to them.

Content: We just a quarterly mix of two months of Just Sold with a testimonial from the seller followed by one month of Market Statistics update for your area or some other type of expertise.

Calling: If you are working Future business, we advise a monthly touch base call to Seller BC leads.

Cost: You want to budget perhaps $10-30/year per lead for calling.

Content: The key is developing rapport and getting good information on their situation and taking good notes so the Caller can use the prior notes to reconnect with rapport on monthly calls.

Matching Phone Numbers to Addresses

Vendors such as Landvoice can offer services to append phone numbers based on an address. Here is info on Landvoice options:

Best Agent Business can pull the records on a regular basis from Prime Seller Leads or your database to send to be matched with phone numbers and then update the database by doing the data entry/updating of phone numbers.